cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/15011909
Feedback welcome! Here’s the TL;DR list
- Listen more to more Black people
- Post less – and think before you post
- Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
- Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects
Other suggestions?
Makes sense to me, nothing to add! I hope the fediverse gets better for marginalized people…
Unfortunately Lemmy being a reddit-like platform, there’s likely gonna be a bunch of reddit-like people in these comments saying reddit-like things that go against one or all of these guidelines.
The Fediverse does have a massive white slant and the default experience isn’t very embracing of different cultures.
There’s a bunch of people who would like to see things improved and as of yet, there’s not much consensus. The only real idea I’ve seen floated thus far is blocklist subscriptions.
A massive part of the problem as I see it is, and don’t get me wrong, this is a symptom, not a root cause, people are inclined to use the wrong tools. Mastodon is a microblog and yet people are determined to use it for groups and nuanced conversation where their instance only supports 400 characters.
Also WriteFreely is the only active blog service in the Fediverse and needs some love.
We need to encourage people to move to tools that better fit their needs and desires and honestly part of the problem with that is that people feel they’ll lose their interactions/audience and that is about Mastodon being shit, because while they can focus on making things more seamless with Lemmy and soon to be Discourse, NodeBB, etc. They’re seemingly not willing to.
In regards to Lemmy specifically. Lemmy has a problem. You can see that by the fact this has been voted down to oblivion. When people treat ALL like a personal subscription feed and vote down things they’re not interested in or dislike, it creates a monoculture. And no, I’m not saying don’t downvote things, but there’s a difference between voting down something because it’s not great in a community and because you’re trying to curate ALL. Maybe a solution is to add local/subscribed only voting options for communities. Lemmy needs to learn to embrace things that aren’t for you and sometimes, in fact most times, that’s as simple as saying, “that’s not for me, I’ll ignore it.”
Also, while we’re here. Let’s call out instances that don’t update their Lemmy version because they want to make a point, even though doing so would bring quality of life improvements to black community members. Looking at you Beehaw and even Lemmy World.
Also Lemmy.ml for turning into fuck ups. Being the second largest instance, especially one that was less mainstream in their beliefs, they just had to keep doing them. They were never going to be popular, but different and well run was enough. Then they started making questionable decisions and not explaining them. Which, being that they’re so well read, know never ends well. They had more time on their hands and started being overly involved in the instance and that hurts their community members in ways in which they’re too up their arse to take stock of. Step away from the admin panel, let your moderators moderate.
Us not upgrading has nothing to do with making a point.
We’re aiming to run a stable instance, which can come at the cost of delayed updates.
We didn’t update to 0.19.4, and a few weeks later 0.19.5 was released with a number of critical bugfixes.
0.19.6 will have several more fixes for issues introduced in 0.19.4+, such as a fix for remote moderators updating local communities, allowing admins to filter modlog entries by moderator, as well as some performance issues reported by other instances.
We usually wait for other instances to run the latest version for some time to allow bug reports to surface before we update ourselves.
I honestly don’t get it, to me I just see user IDs I haven’t the slightest clue what race someone is or isn’t on here. I vote solely based on whether they make a good point or a bad point.
This may be true of your own experience on Lemmy, but on microblogging software such as Mastodon it is most definitely not the case.
Then perhaps this is not the correct audience for this piece.
The community is called “Fediverse”, and this is about the fediverse, so yes it is the correct audience.
And there’s plenty of anti-Blackness on Lemmy. In fact there’s even a bunch of anti-Blackness in this thread – as somebody on another instance said, it’s illustrates why other instances have defederated lemmy.world! So, if you’re looking for examples, have a look at this thread.
In fact there’s even a bunch of anti-Blackness in this thread
Could you help me find the comments you are referring to? I can’t seem to find them, and I’m worried it might be because I’m subconsciously anti-Blackness
If you can’t find them, then (like many people) that’s a sign you’re used to an environment where anti-Blackness is normalized. So, imagine a Black person reading this thread who’s been targeted by racism on the fediverse. What comments would they think are dismissive of Black people?
I did, and still can’t find any. Please link. It’s not like you are making stuff up.
Pls provide a list of links
I’m sure OP is just still compiling the list. Aaany minute now…
There are plenty of examples in this thread and the crossposts, and more discussion in https://lemmy.world/post/18536867
This is just a link to the other post you made AFTER the comment about all the anti-blackness in THIS thread. So please provide links for that.
It’s not like it is all in your head or anything.
Is there a reason you seem to be upset by this piece? This is a forum for discussion about the Fediverse. Seems entirely appropriate to me.
Not upset, just thought it needed to be said.
It seems odd to expect people to realize this is largely addressing issues in mastodon when it is posted to Lemmy and the summary uses terms that are interchangable. Most people are not going to take the time to follow the link if they have a negative reaction to the summary.
In short, the summary is very easy for people to take as some sort of attack on the places they personally spend time in on the fediverse as lacking. I don’t think most people look around on Lemmy and see evidence of what is being addressed as though it is an all encompassing problem, and so you get knee-jerk downvotes and that’s the extent of the engagement.
Fair point I forgot Mastodon even existed honestly, I did try it early on but it’s not for me.
Stop asking Black people for evidence of the anti-Blackness. Believe them: it’s real. If you want to see specific examples, do the work yourself to find them rather than asking Black people to do it for you.
IMO examples are exactly what should be provided on this page. The page would be much better if it were just 3-4 headings that looked like
Heading
Example quote 1
Improvement suggestion
Example quote 2
Improvement suggestion
Description and context
Also, why limit it to “blackness”. What in the world is “blackness”? Sounds like black royalty “Your Blackness, how may I be of help today?”.
Anyway, I’m not sure what prompted this, which is exactly why I ask for examples. I quit reddit (never was on twitter) during the exodus and honestly, the biggest change I’d like is for USAmericans to get their own instance where they can talk about their problems. Black US Americans deal with very different things than Africans and Europeans with African descent.
Are black people all going to have labels so we know who to support and listen to? I think this is pretty weird tbh.
